Brindlewood Bay as an open campaign

For the last few months I’ve been running two simultaneous open table roleplaying campaigns: every Tuesday, in odd weeks, I run Brindlewood Bay – in which you are cozy elderly women investigating increasing dark murder mysteries – and in even weeks I run Mausritter – in which you are mice with swords and magic in a world that is just like ours, but a little bigger.

I have written more about the Mausritter campaign (part 1 and part 2), and I even publish a separate log of what happens in the world of Berryhill, but I have not done so for Brindlewood Bay. This is mostly because in Mausritter, we are exploring a world that I largely invented myself based on prompts in the book. For Brindlewood Bay, I run the official mysteries, and I don’t feel like I should publish those stories here.

But yesterday, we played the finale. So here is a review of the game, and how I ran it.

About the game

Like I said: players in Brindlewood Bay are portraying elderly women, members of the local Murder Mavens mystery book club. Besides reading mystery novels, they solve actual murder mysteries, sometimes by request of the authorities, but mostly in spite of requests not to. During the course of the campaign, the cases start to get darker, and occult things start to happen, as the Mavens become more and more aware that there is a cult behind all these murders.

The unique twist of the mystery system that I as a Keeper also do not know the answer and the beginning of the session. The mysteries do only come with a list of locations, suspects and clues, but not with a solution. The clues aren’t even tied to places nor people: as the Keeper I get to pick them from a list whenever my players roll for them. And in the end of the session, all the players get to theorize together what happened, and then a dice roll will determine if we are correct.

This all means you can replay the mysteries: different clues will come up, different accents will be put on the story, and a different person might have done it. It also means I don’t have to be very guarded with my spoilers here: in your own game, the solution might be totally different.

The open table

Let’s face it: Brindlewood Bay probably shines the best in a campaign with the same 3-4 players and a Keeper. That is a luxury that not many can afford: it’s very hard to get a group of that size at the table consistently, as every player is a person with real life commitments.

The open table meant that anyone could sign up. I had quite a few returning players, but also a handful of players that joined for only one session. The maximum number of tickets available was 5 and I do think the sessions where we hit that number were challenging, but luckily there were also a lot of sessions where only 3 or 4 people could make it. I even played an episode as a spin-off show during a one-on-one session, where I moved the whole mystery to The Netherlands in the fictional town of Bloemwijk aan Zee.

Because I publish mouse-names on my mouse-log, I might as well give you a list here of all the mysteries I played:

• Dad Overboard with Bernice, Daisy, Jessica, Joyce and Nellie
• All Hallows Scream with Bernice, Daisy and Ethel
• Great Brindlewood Bay Bake Off with Bernice, Daisy and Hyacinth
• A Throng of Vice and Liars with Birdie, Daisy, Jessica and Melodie
• Night at the Whaling Museum with Bernice, Daisy, Ethel, Jessica and Lilla Mor
• Deadly Silent Auction with Daisy, Jessica and Ruby
• Dead Man’s Hand (Bloemwijk Pokertoernooi) with Trijntje
• Fudge, Jury, Executioner with Bernice, Ethel, Jessica and Joyce
• and the grand finale with Bernice, Daisy, Ethel, Jessica, Joyce, Nellie, Ruby, Trijntje and freshly joined Laura

Changing the game

The game was not written for an open table, but I would argue the mystery structure lends itself well for playing that way. I made it a rule that every session would be a mystery on its own, and thus that every session should end with a Theorize Move and a solution.

The game is also explicitly stating one should avoid playing with five or more players. As you can see in the list above, that did not always happen, as I wanted to keep the session open to five players. I do completely agree that the best sessions where those with fewer people, but my other house rule helped: the maximum group size for the Mavens to do anything was 3, so they always had to split up.

Another effect of this setup was that sometimes, the story was a bit rushed. Especially with mysteries of complexity 8, it was quite a race to get the eight clues together that they kind of wanted to have. Introducing all the NPCs of the mystery was also challenging. Part of why I wanted to end the campaign is also because it is tiring, cramming that much story into a three-hour timeslot.

A closed campaign, with the same players in every session, opens the possibility to have two or three sessions for each mystery and I think that would be much more enjoyable. There would be more time to really get to know the NPCs, but more importantly also our main characters. I also had multiple sessions where I did not use the Day/Night Move at all, and I inflicted conditions very seldomly, making the Cozy Move completely obsolete. We just didn’t have time for it.

I am not saying this made the game better. Quite the contrary. But I do think these changes made it possible to run the game at the place I was running it, and a game beats no game!

What I did like was my little system with tokens. I have a little box with tokens in the form of red, blue and gold diamonds. Every time a Clue was found, I would put a gold piece on a little card with the mystery’s complexity number written on it. For a Void Clue, I would put a blue token down, and if there were complications (or a complete miss) I would take out a red one to remind me of this. With Crown of the Queen I would give the red token to the player, as a reminder they had to play out a flashback scene. These tokens helped me keep track, and also saved me from having to say the meta words of “this counts as a Void Clue”, etc.

Writing the final mystery

I obviously read the whole book before I started, but when I prepared for the final mystery, I was reminded that there was a part about it, and I reread it. I should have done that sooner: it was not just about the campaign finale, but also about how to fill in the details about cult itself, which I could and probably should have used in the later sessions of the campaign.

But like I wrote before: a game beats no game. There was just no time to also add that other layer to it, and it would have been a juggle to keep it interesting for anyone who joined irregularly or for the first time.

Preparing for the finale I created a little mystery of my own, also without a solution but with the familiar lists of suspects, locations and clues. Of course I reused a lot of existing locations and characters, but I made sure to add some new ones in as well. And I wrote a very long intro to recap three specific sessions (Dad Overboard, Night at the Museum and the Fudge one) so that we had a shared reference before we started.

As for characters: I had been using the character cards you can buy as an expansion and I think that is a very valuable addition, especially when you play in this dense format as I did. It just helps tremendously with knowing who is who. Every card has a face and a name on one side, and the art and name of the mystery on the other.

I thought some of those characters were from a generic Brindlewood Bay deck, not mentioned in any mystery and therefore open for interpretation. It turns out they are mentioned: there are descriptions about them and their possible roles in the cult. If I knew this earlier I would’ve introduced them during a prior session. (But again: they were full enough as is.)

I really enjoyed putting this together and it kind of inspired me to maybe write more Brindlewood Bay mysteries, but that thought it too fresh to have actually have followed through. We will see.

The grand finale

The finale itself was a lot of fun: instead of the usual 5 tickets, I had asked for a capacity of 10. When it sort of stopped at 7 we closed the ticket sales, but two people showed up anyway, giving myself NINE players in the final session. I was glad I announced it as a chaotic session, so everyone was expecting it.

With nine people you need to split the party, and so we did, into three groups of three. This meant some downtime for most of the attendees, but I believe everyone enjoyed the story in the end.

It was also the day before my birthday (which makes today, yes, my birthday), and during the break they gave me presents. It really felt more like a party-with-story and I couldn’t have had a better one. (Or well, I will do three completely other celebrations this week too, all great in their own way, but that’s besides the point.)

Can you run a Brindlewood Bay game for an open table? I would say you can!